The challenge
Cable and battery theft is a daily cost for South African infrastructure owners. Unmanned cabinets are opened, stripped and closed again, and the first sign is a site that stops reporting, or a community without water or power.
The owner already has telemetry in many of these cabinets, but security is handled by a separate alarm company with its own panels, SIM cards and control room. Two systems watch the same box and neither sees the whole picture.
Heat is the other silent threat. Batteries and electronics in sun-baked steel cabinets fail early, and nobody knows until they do.
Our approach
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Risk ranking
We rank sites by theft history, criticality and response time, so the first phase protects the cabinets whose loss hurts most.
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Sensors on the existing controller
Door contacts, vibration and tilt sensors, temperature and battery voltage are wired into the RTU or PLC already in the cabinet. Where there isn’t one, a compact PLC with built-in 4G/LTE does the job.
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One alarm stream
Security events travel over the same IEC 60870-5-104 link as the process data and land in the same SCADA alarm list, time-stamped and placed on a map. Critical alarms also go out by SMS to the standby technician and the armed-response provider.
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Response and review
Sites are put into maintenance mode for planned visits, so any other door opening is escalated. Monthly reports show event counts, response times and repeat-target sites.
System architecture
How the layers connect, from the people using the system down to the equipment in the field.
- Control room
- Standby technicians (SMS)
- Armed-response partner (SMS)
- Unified SCADA alarm list
- Map-based site view
- Event history and reports
- IEC 60870-5-104 over GSM/LTE
- SMS alarm path
- Existing RTU or PLC
- or compact PLC with 4G/LTE
- Battery-backed
- Door contacts
- Vibration and tilt
- Temperature and battery voltage
- Mains-fail
What we’d deploy
- Door, vibration and tilt sensing on every protected cabinet
- Cabinet temperature and battery-voltage monitoring
- Compact 4G/LTE PLCs where no controller exists
- SMS alarm notifications to technicians and response partners
- Maintenance mode per site so authorised visits aren’t escalated
- Map-based site view in SCADA
Target outcomes
Targets we would design and report against, not measured results from a named client. Actual results depend on the baseline established in the audit.
